Daily I'm going to create a number of Tessitura Accounts based on information we are gathering at several points around the building.
I have a sense that there are several ways I could automate this:
What are folks having the most success with as an approach for bulk creating accounts? Particularly methods that is robust to Tessitura System Changes over time?
What documentation exists for automating such a process?
Thanks for any help you are able to share.
--Tom
We are regularly doing Customer Imports using the bog standard Customer Import, saving the import log as a list and adding the additional Constituencies and Attributes in bulk with "Manage" Utilities. Automating this would be great but adding Relationships in bulk is a frequent pain.
Looking forward to hearing what you end up with
Thanks. I'm looking forward to hearing what I end up with as well.
When you say the "bog standard Custom Import". To confirm you are specificly talking about the Report/Utility Customer Import Utility, that takes formating a spreadsheet into a format that matches the Templete files?...
So, I've done that in the past. And and although it works. I don't think that this is not going to work for the current project. If the current project is going to be successful. I'm going to have to automate this to the "hands off" level. (No Spreadsheets. No hand done file copies.) In the work that I've done with that utility over the years I've had reliability problems. Particularly around upgrades and server changes because of how the files are handled.
So, I want to take this to the next level.
Katie Lachance-Duffy, Nick Reilingh, , Troy Nelson any thoughts?
Yes that utility
Use of a SSIS package would do this automation and that's what it is designed to do. The main thing here is consistency on the input side.
Troy Nelson
I agree that making consistent data out of quickly entered customer data is going to be one of the challenges.
I'm going to have to investigate what options I have to use SSIS on RAMP.
What I've done in the past is leverage the import utilities, but load data into the import work tables myself. The utilities are designed to allow for this without too much difficulty IIRC. That said, the import utilities are also supposed to support automated runs using datafiles dropped into a share location. The question is whether you'd rather transform your input into a datafile format (or attempt to use a custom format specification to map an input format to Tessitura's expected fields), or load your input directly into the work tables in the work table schema. In my case I was already doing record linkage on my data inside the database prior to importing it as constituent records, so the latter option made more sense.
My first scenario for this type of work is for data from inside the Tessitura database.
My second scenario is for data coming in from outside of our database.
I'd like to have a consistent mechanism for both scenarios to keep maintenance and upgrading to a more manageable scope.